Page 47 of The Unkindest Tide

Farms still spread out around us, but there were none of the airy domes, and the crops seemed to be, on the whole, both wilder and denser, forming veritable forests of sea pears and undulating kelp.

They were also utterly abandoned. No farmers tilled the soil; no farmhands gathered the ripe fruits; no children played hide-and-seek through the greenery. The fields we’d passed beneath the Duchy of Ships had been alive with the denizens of the Undersea. These were lush and healthy and ready for the harvest, and there was no one there.

Resisting the urge to draw my knife—for comfort, if nothing else—I descended through the water, gesturing for Quentin to follow. The palace stood in the distance, an elegant construct of stone and coral rising from the sea floor in gravity-defying spires and towers that would never have been possible on land. Smaller buildings clustered around the foundations, tucked safely behind lacy walls of living coral. We dipped lower and lower as we approached, until we were swimming along causeways that I suppose technically could be considered streets, although they weren’t paved; the ground was sometimes decorated, sometimes cultivated in flowering plants or elaborate playgrounds, but it wasn’t meant for walking on.

And still there were no people. I thought I saw motion in some of the windows we passed, but no one came out to either greet or attack us.

Patrick had said the people of Saltmist would have changed sides as soon as the palace was seized. I was starting to wonder how true that was. It was like we were swimming through a ghost town.

I had no idea how much time had passed since we’d gone into the water. I assumed it was about an hour, but I needed to err on the side of caution, given the circumstances. I picked up the pace, urging Quentin to do the same.

There were openings around the base of the palace, tight little tunnels designed for use by servants and household staff. Torin would never have demeaned himself to use them, or even to send his forces through them; according to Patrick, if we were going to find Helmi holed up with Peter somewhere in the palace, it would be in the storerooms of the lower levels. If they weren’t there . . .

Saltmist was a Duchy. It spanned miles, and all that territory was unfamiliar. I’d been here once before, and most of my time had been spent in the palace. Quentin didn’t even have that much to go on. If Helmi and Peter had been moved, or had fled, we were going to be hard-pressed to find them before our time ran out.

We were almost to one of those entrances when something moved, warning us we were not alone. I drew myself back in a hard stop, putting out an arm to force Quentin to do the same, and watched as what I had taken for a piece of masonry uncurled itself, becoming a Cephali man.

He looked like a Merrow from the waist up, and like an octopus from the waist down. The skin of both halves was lemon yellow, although large blue rings marked his octopus half. His hair was an even brighter blue, verging on neon. He looked at us warily, hands moving in a quick, interrogative gesture.

Shit. It made sense that there’d be some sort of sign language in the Undersea, for use when having every word broadcast for miles wasn’t a good idea. But if I couldn’t speak their verbal language, there was no way I could fake their silent one.

Cephali. Dianda had several Cephali in her employ, including the missing Helmi. Here goes everything, I thought, and mouthed, with exquisite care, ‘Duchess Lorden sent us.’

It felt silly, like trying to perform a mime show where the price of failure was death. But slowly, the Cephali man nodded. He indicated Quentin with one tentacle.

I nodded back, with substantially more enthusiasm. ‘Yes,’ I mouthed. ‘Both of us. Looking for Peter.’ Grammar seemed less important than getting my point across.

The Cephali man nodded again before withdrawing up the wall, into the shadows. The yellow and blue faded until he looked like part of the wall once again, just another piece of decorative molding.

We didn’t have time to wait and see if this was a trick. I dove for the hole, Quentin close behind me, and tried to ignore the way the walls pressed in against us. There was always the chance that we were swimming into a dead end, catching ourselves like crabs in a pot.

I didn’t think so. From everything I’d heard, Saltmist was considered a thriving Undersea domain, and part of that could be credited to Patrick’s presence. Yes, being married to a Daoine Sidhe meant Dianda wasn’t as socially high-ranking as she could have been, if she’d married another Merrow and kept to the standards of her own kind. But it also meant Saltmist was less cruel than it might have been. Her people liked her. They liked her family. They might not be willing to fight against Torin, but did that mean they were going to turn on the people who had taken care of them for so many years?

I didn’t think so. And so I kept swimming, until I had to stop kicking my tail and start pulling myself along with both hands. Quentin was so close behind me that the top of his head kept brushing the sensitive edge of my flukes. I was almost grateful for that, since I couldn’t turn around and check on him anymore, not with the walls pressing in around us. As long as I could feel him, we were okay.

Unless that wasn’t him, and he’d been grabbed by one of Torin’s people while I’d been swimming. I started pulling myself along faster, gripped by the need to see my squire. When we reached the top, we’d be all right. I’d be able to confirm that it was him, and we’d be all right.

There was no way to know how long we spent forcing our way through that tight, unforgiving space before my questing hand broke through the surface of a still pool and into the air. I grasped the pool’s edge and pulled myself up, gasping as water ran from the gills on my neck and my lungs suddenly ached for air. That transition might have felt natural to a true Merrow, but to me, it was disconcerting in the extreme.

All things considered, the heavy object slamming into the back of my skull was even more disconcerting. Something cracked, bone giving way under the brutal force of the assault, and I dropped back into the water, which was suddenly veiled red with my own blood. Quentin thrashed below me, trying to pull me down. I pulled my flukes out of his grasp, keeping him from doing more than tugging.

The attack had come from behind. My skull was already healing, flesh and bone knitting back together with horrifying speed, and the blood in the water was focusing me, filling my nose and mouth as I breathed it in, creating an invigorating feedback loop. My strength is in the blood, even when it’s my own.

Whatever hit me, it had been too wide and blunt to be anything other than an improvised weapon. Someone was trying to keep us out of this room. That was a good thing. Torin’s guards had been carrying tridents, brutally pointed, with barbed, cutting edges. If I’d taken a trident to the head, I would be in a lot more pain. Logically, whoever had just attacked me wasn’t one of Torin’s men.

My head didn’t hurt anymore. Here went everything. I turned around in the tight tunnel, so I’d be facing the direction the last attack had come from, and pulled myself up for a second time, spitting out water as fast as I could.

“Dianda sent me!” I said, once I could form words again. They still came out a little garbled by the water in my throat and lungs. “Dianda sent me to find Peter!”

The room was small, and dark, and lined with shelves, each of them filled to bursting with supplies that did better when kept dry, flour and sugar and beans and rice. There was even a shelf of what looked like office supplies, which made a certain amount of sense. The Undersea Kingdoms didn’t exist in total isolation. They needed a way to communicate with the land, and paper messages sent by courier was probably easiest, as well as being fairly traditional.

A surprising number of fae nobles have email these days, mostly due to the efforts of Countess January O’Leary and her daughter, April. But there’s always going to be a place for the traditional ways.

The room was also apparently unoccupied. I couldn’t see any sign of the person who’d assaulted me before, although I was pretty sure I could see the weapon: a large box of pancake mix was near the edge of the hole, dangerously close to the water. I thought of the Cephali guard I’d seen before, the one who’d been able to blend into the wall until he decided he didn’t want to. We weren’t alone. We just seemed to be.

I closed my eyes, spat out the last of the water, and breathed in, tasting the air for traces of fae blood. Someone doesn’t have to be actually bleeding for me to read their heritage; they just need to be close enough for me to pick up on their presence.

My first breath was all saltwater and the lingering scent of my own blood. My second blossomed bright with Cephali. Not Helmi—it wasn’t a familiar flavor, for all that I recognized its source—but Cephali all the same.